'Very strong result' for Roscommon Town in litter survey

Roscommon Town continues to rise the ranks of the Irish Business Against Litter (IBAL) survey, retaining its 'clean' status in the latest litter report published today.

This time last year, the county town narrowly missed out on ‘clean’ status and was still “moderately littered”, ranked 27th out of 40 towns and cities. In the summer, Roscommon Town regained its clean status position, rising to 23rd spot in the ranking. It has now risen to 12th, marking a steady and significant improvement.

The An Taisce report for Roscommon town noted the improvement in the town in recent surveys “and this was a very strong result”. Seven out of the ten sites surveyed received the top litter grade. These included Centre Point Shopping Centre, some of the approach roads and Roscommon Arts Centre.

While Main Street just missed the top litter grade, it was particularly freshly presented and maintained.

"While there was some improvement at wasteground adjacent to the recycle facility, they were not sufficient to lift it from a heavily littered one – works have definitely taken place here, but there is still scope for further improvements,” the report noted.

Locally, Longford Town, also achieving a ‘clean’ status, climbed to 22nd, while Sligo Town finished atop the IBAL table for the first time.

The An Taisce report for Longford town stated, it was a very good result for the town, one of its best since winning the IBAL league a number of years ago, with no heavily littered sites. At 32 in the rankings, Athlone was deemed ‘moderately littered’.

The number of towns deemed clean last year rose to 28, with Sligo finishing ahead of Leixlip, Westport and Monaghan. An Taisce, who conduct the surveys on behalf of IBAL, lauded the winning town for its consistently strong performance in recent years.

“The most pleasing finding of 2025 was the progress made in socially disadvantaged areas,” explains Mr Conor Horgan of IBAL. There was a notable fall-off in the number of sites with large accumulations of litter or subject to dumping, he added. “This continues a very welcome trend we’ve seen in recent surveys and credit must go to local authorities for ridding our environment of these litter blackspots,” continued Mr Horgan. This was the first IBAL survey where no bottle bank was deemed a litter blackspot.

The survey revealed that the Deposit Return Scheme continues to have a positive impact on the cleanliness of towns and cities, with a 10% drop in the prevalence of cans and plastic bottles compared to the previous year. These two types of litter are now 60% less common than when the scheme was introduced in early 2024.

Coffee cups remained one of the most commonly found forms of litter and were evident in one fifth of all sites surveyed.

“A real disappointment in a generally positive year has been the likely collapse of coffee cup schemes in towns such as Killarney,” Mr Horgan said. “It is apparent that such schemes will only work with statutory backing. As our data today bears out, without Government intervention coffee cups will remain an unsightly and entirely unnecessary blot on the landscape across our towns. The prevarication from the Government on the issue is striking - a levy was promised all of four years ago – and sends out a worrying signal. Weaning ourselves off single-use coffee cups should not be such a big deal.” 

The prevalence of disposable vapes, which are set to be outlawed over the course of 2026, was unchanged.